It's not too bad. Slashdot does look dated these days, though that's up to individual taste whether it's a 'bad thing'.

Anyway, two things jump out:

1. It needs to be adaptive (i.e. fit the window) rather than be fixed width. Slashdot is about the comments and the comments are nested. Nesting means you need width.
2. Drop the sidebar on the story pages - or use an abbreviated one and stack the comments full-width underneath the story and 'sidebar'. Sort of like, well, it is now.
3. I don't really get what is going on at the top of the front page. Are the stories with the images the 'most popular' or just a random selection with images? I typically scan read the stories looking for something that is interesting - hiding the summary behind an image will make me less likely to read not more.

In short I guess: change the design if you like, but keep the layout. It works.

I'm also surprised that you've appear to have opted not to use one of the layout frameworks (e.g. Foundation). Sure you can code it all up yourself but even the bare bones of Foundation would give you a layout the fundamentally 'just works' on different platforms.

You're not adding noise, you're adding data.

Say hello... ...to the slippery slope!

My favourite bit of the linked article...

The upper right area of Gnome Shellâ(TM)s top panel contained four separate items with their corresponding menus used for configuring sound, internet connections, power and user settings. This was bloated, fragmented and space consuming especially in the case of using extensions that need space on the right.

A new status menu that unifies all the above individual settings in one was imperative and we got it on 3.10!

...directly above a screenshot showing the top panel in question - which is 80% empty space.

Seems you can justify anything in UI design if you include the magic words "bloated, fragmented and space consuming" in your rationale.

Or a policeman having to commandeer a vehicle to stop a crime?

What?

If that's a serious concern then forget speed limits - we need to install a Yakety Sax button on every dash.

It was in an 86pt font.

"catty calling the cattle black"

Whaaaaaat.....?

This has to win an award for the most mis-heard idiom ever.

Going to show my age here. But when we went on long holiday trips with my mum as kids (from the UK down to the south of France over a couple of days) she kept us entertained by giving us a couple of pillow cases with random entertainments in it - board games, card games, i-spy quiz things, books, anything. Every hour or so we'd take out something new and that shut us up for a while. Looking now it's a 32hr round-trip managed with 2 stops (one on a Ferry for an hour) each way - and she was doing this by herself with just me and my brother for company.

In-car AV entertainment is easier - but it's by no means essential.

I had a similar problem with a bank account with the Royal Bank of Scotland. They lock you out of your bank account after 3 failed attempts to enter the correct password for a given customer number. Unfortunately because this number was similar to one for another account I kept mistaking the last few digits when typing it in. A few tries using my correct password and it'd lock up and tell me to phone customer services (up to a 15 minute phone call) to find out my account wasn't locked at all. I asked but (understandably) they wouldn't unlock the other account at my request.

I must have done that at least 5 or 6 times. How annoying must that have been for whoever that account belonged to?

...now, if only I could figure out which of the 9 randomly linked words in the summary actually points to it.

If Rob Pegoraro is this bad at getting traffic perhaps he should have been fired.